RFK Jr., page 13
Kennedy came on board the program just as the Fishermen’s Association was preparing to sue Exxon. “He showed up wearing shit-kicker boots9, ragged chinos and spitting tobacco,” said a former friend, reflecting on Kennedy’s deep appreciation of the South. “Bobby loved the rednecks in the South and he looked more like he belonged at a truck stop.”
Kennedy, now thirty-one, believed that he was finally firmly following in his father’s footsteps, working for social justice. His two-year probation was over10—in fact, it had been ended a year early—and he had finally been sworn in to the New York State Bar Association following a standard review by the Committee on Character and Fitness of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court. “He impressed me as a person of considerable integrity, a person who is intellectually acute and unusually modest,” said Harold J. Reynolds, the committee’s interviewer. “I unreservedly approved him.”
For Kennedy, the newly minted attorney, the experience marked the beginning of his career in environmental law, a subject he confessed he knew little about. “Prior to that time, I knew little about civil litigation, and next to nothing about environmental law,” he wrote.
His first big case involved litigation over the cleanup of Quassaick Creek, a seven-mile tributary of the Hudson River that flows into the town and city of Newburgh. The creek was a “conveyance for industrial and municipal waste,”11 he wrote. When Kennedy and Cronin began their investigation of the toxic and refuse-choked creek, they found “so many pipes and drains emptying into the mouth [of the creek] that I wondered whether there was anything alive in this part of the creek. I found long strings of toilet paper and what we euphemistically called ‘brown trout’ or ‘river pickles’: human fecal material,” wrote Kennedy. “After a short time cuts on my hand began to fester.”
Both riverkeepers went undercover, carrying backpacks filled with vials, maps, and flashlights as well as fishing poles, enabling them to pose as local anglers out for a day trip on the river. They donned wet suits and dived into waters laced with raw sewage and naphthalene, a cancer-causing toxin found in coal tar and gasoline, to collect samples from illegally discharging pipes. They walked every inch of the seven-mile-long creek, sneaking into shoreline companies under cover of darkness to document pipes that were illegally pouring toxins into the water.
The two riverkeepers appealed to local authorities, who they quickly found were more interested in getting rich than in providing clean water for their constituents. When they found that the city of Newburgh planned to sell a boat ramp and three acres of public parkland to an acquaintance of the mayor at a low price in order to develop a floating restaurant, they were even more committed to do battle. The restaurant and a new boat ramp, which would benefit from a state government grant to stabilize the shoreline, would cut off access to the creek for residents. For many of the local lawmakers, barring locals from enjoying the creek seemed to be the point. One local developer12, cited by Kennedy in his environmental memoir, noted, “We are not going to have spades drinking and screwing and swimming around our new boat ramp, if that’s what you mean by the public.” For Kennedy, the racist comments were an epiphany. “At that moment I knew I wanted to be an environmental lawyer13. Any ambivalence I’d felt about having abandoned the battle for social justice when I took up arms for a clean environment was gone,” he wrote in The Riverkeepers. “In fact, the battle for the environment was the ultimate civil rights and human rights contest, a struggle to maintain public control over publicly owned resources against special interests that would monopolize, segregate and liquidate them for cash.”
Kennedy and his partner began researching the boat launch property as well as the Newburgh City Charter’s rules on selling city-owned land. Reading through the minutes of various city council meetings, they learned that the city had blatantly ignored the rules. The charter required a vote of four to five council members on all sales of city-owned property. The council vote had been three to five. The charter had also made provisions for competitive bidding, which had also been ignored, he wrote.
Kennedy called the city’s corporation counsel, letting him know that the city was not in compliance with its own rules. Newburgh’s lawyer agreed to retake the vote. In the meantime, Kennedy told him that Riverkeeper would be bidding on the boat launch property even though the group didn’t have the cash. “Our offer put the city government14 in a temporary quandary,” he wrote. “. . . We were able to stall the vote in city council15, giving ourselves time to devise a strategy to save the boat ramp.”
Cronin and Kennedy eventually identified twenty-four sources of pollution of the creek and brought lawsuits against sixteen companies under the federal Clean Water Act, which became front-page news in New York. The companies settled before trial and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Riverkeeper clean up the Quassaick, wrote Kennedy. Among the defendants was the city of Newburgh. Although the activists had demanded financial penalties from the industrialists polluting the Quassaick, they knew that Newburgh was “so impoverished, and the poverty of its citizenry so stark,” that they decided to offer a compromise. In lieu of monetary penalties, the fishermen asked that the city permanently abandon its plan to sell the boat ramp, which it readily accepted. Newburgh also granted the fishermen’s group a “conservation easement” that perpetually protected the ramp from being sold to any private developer, said Kennedy, adding that the city had agreed to maintain the property as a public space. “The results of the Quassaick Creek cases16 were particularly gratifying because they were my first successes as an environmental lawyer,” he wrote. “I’d discovered powerful tools for making polluters clean up after themselves.”
The two militant environmentalists continued to work together on projects for the Fishermen’s Association and began to establish an important national presence. The group opened a clinic at Pace University law school, where Kennedy soon found himself teaching environmental law and working with his students to identify and sue companies that continued to pollute the Hudson River.
In their working relationship, Cronin spent a great deal of time “managing Bobby,” said a government official who worked with both of them on the New York City Watershed, a vital water source encompassing 2,000 square miles in upstate New York. “It was John who kept Bobby in line and made sure he didn’t do anything crazy.”
Kennedy’s life was looking up. In 1985, he and Emily bought a sprawling white clapboard farmhouse on ten acres on South Bedford Road in Bedford, New York, for $745,000. Three years later, in 1988, he and Emily celebrated another milestone with the birth of their daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy. Kick was named for her great-aunt, the lively, outgoing second daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy, who in 1944 had married the British politician and aristocrat William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, who had a tragic end. “Billy,” as he was known in British society circles, was among the wealthiest and most eligible bachelors in London. Kathleen’s older brother Joe Kennedy, who was in London on the eve of his secret mission for the US Navy, was the only Kennedy family member to attend her wedding.
The couple spent only a few weeks together before Cavendish was called up for military duty in France and Belgium, where he died four months later in September 1944, killed by a sniper bullet while leading forces to capture the town of Heppen in Belgium. His death followed on the heels of Joe Kennedy’s fiery accident when his plane exploded during Operation Aphrodite. Later, Kathleen began a romantic relationship with Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, Eighth Earl Fitzwilliam, a well-known married gambler and Protestant who was even wealthier than Cavendish. Her parents were furious at the relationship, even though Peter had promised to leave his wife and marry her. In May 1948, Kathleen had planned to meet her father in Paris to appeal for his help in marrying Peter. Days before the meeting, the couple took off for a vacation in the south of France. They died when their plane crashed during a storm.
In order to memorialize Kathleen within the family, Robert and Ethel Kennedy had named their first child, born in 1951, Kathleen. More than thirty years later, Kennedy sought to do the same thing by naming his daughter Kathleen.
***
By the late 1980s, as he solidified his environmental bona fides, Kennedy found himself surrounded by some powerful family members whom he could call upon to help him in his crusade to save the planet. Kathleen, Kennedy’s older sister, worked in the Maryland state government and would serve as lieutenant governor of the state from 1995 to 2003. His uncle Teddy continued in his role as “the lion of the Senate,” and his older brother, Joe, was elected to Congress for Massachusetts in 1987. “I have enough friends and family17 who are in the House and Senate, so if I want legislation, I have the access,” Kennedy told a reporter.
In June 1990, another powerful ally emerged when his younger sister Kerry married Andrew Cuomo, the politically ambitious son of New York Governor Mario Cuomo. In fact, it was at Andrew Cuomo’s bachelor party that Kennedy buttonholed the governor, who was sitting alone at the bar, to lobby him on his environmental crusades. “Nobody else was talking to him18,” Kennedy recalled. “So I made him sit and listen to me.” Years later, he would rely on the elder Cuomo for legal representation after he was charged with trespassing on Vieques.
Andrew was his father’s closest adviser and the manager of his political campaigns. When he married into the Kennedy dynasty, he was the chair of the New York City Homeless Commission under Mayor David Dinkins. He would go on to be federal secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton administration and launched his first run for governor of New York in 2000. At that time, Kennedy confessed his true feelings about his brother-in-law in his diary when he wrote, “Andrew could win because he is totally focused19 and energetic. He could lose because he lacks humanity and doesn’t love people. He is not a retail politician.”
For his part, Kennedy was emerging as a power player in environmental circles. He began openly criticizing the city of New York for “stalling” in its commitment to clean up its water supply and later took credit for helping to establish an important environmental agreement.
“We tried cases in every court in New York and helped orchestrate a watershed agreement that garnered $1.5 billion from New York City to buy land and otherwise restore and protect the Catskill and Westchester streams that feed the Hudson,” he said.
But Kennedy greatly exaggerated his role in the protracted negotiations among the New York City government, the state of New York, and the communities along the Hudson that hammered out the agreement for New York’s drinking water that has stood the test of time. “Bobby was never part of the negotiations20,” said Daniel Ruzow, the environmental attorney who represented and continues to represent the Catskill Watershed Corporation. “Bobby was more of a visitor at the negotiations.”
Ruzow said that Riverkeeper and Kennedy had been brought in only toward the end of the eighteen months of negotiations, which had begun in the spring of 1995 although the entire project had started in 1990. New York Governor George Pataki believed that consulting local environmental groups would make for good optics, but none of them was ever profoundly involved in the process, said Ruzow, adding that of the hundreds of meetings that had taken place, Kennedy and Cronin had been part of two or three. “Bobby was a flake,” he said. “He would say things he was not prepared for then. He would come with a script to the meetings but had little understanding of what he was talking about.”
The federal Environmental Protection Agency wanted New York City to come up with a better way to keep the upstate reservoirs that are the source of the city’s drinking water clean. The choices were to build a huge filtration plant that could cost the city between $4 billion and $8 billion or to buy up land near the reservoirs and restrict development within the 2,000-square-mile watershed. The land would act as a buffer around the reservoirs.
To spur the city to buy up the properties, Kennedy said, his team at Riverkeeper had come up with a public service campaign in the spring of 1993 that speculated about how much of Amy Fisher’s urine21 was seeping into a city reservoir from the sewage of the nearby Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, where she was an inmate. The campaign drew on the notoriety of Fisher, who had been on the front pages of newspapers across the city in the spring of 1992, known by her tabloid moniker “Long Island Lolita.” Fisher was convicted in December of that year in the shooting of her neighbor Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the front porch of her home in Massapequa. Fisher, who was seventeen at the time of the shooting, was having an affair with Mary Jo’s husband, Joey Buttafuoco, who was thirty-eight years old. Mary Jo survived the shooting but was left with a bullet lodged in her head. After Fisher pled guilty, she was convicted of assault and sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison, which she served in New Hampshire State Prison for Women and the higher-security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women near the Kennedy farmhouse.
The ploy seemed to work on David Dinkins, who was mayor of New York at the time. He agreed to meet with Kennedy to discuss the water issue if his group would refrain from running the ads. Kennedy agreed and later boasted about having spent two hours speaking with Dinkins in his office.
Kennedy could be very persuasive in his environmental crusades, but he could also be arrogant and nasty when he was involved in negotiations, according to a key government bureaucrat who was at the forefront of the watershed negotiations. “He was very ambitious22, and I was eager to meet him because I admired the Kennedys, but in our first meeting he threatened to have me fired,” said Marilyn Gelber, New York’s commissioner of environmental protection, the first woman to be appointed to the position in 1994. Gelber had dealt with the myriad lawsuits that Kennedy launched against the city, and it was she who had negotiated with Pataki after he had come into office the following year, about the watershed program. Following “very hard” negotiations with state officials, community leaders in the Catskills, and later environmental groups, including Riverkeeper and especially the NRDC, the city reached a landmark agreement to protect New York City’s water supply. “We were successful,” she said. “And thirty years later, the agreement has held.”
At the time, though, she said, she had been concerned that displacing residents in the Catskills to create the watershed would be too disruptive and wanted to set up a fund to help them resettle in other parts of the state. “Bobby was very critical, and just wanted people out and the government to acquire more land, even though statistics showed that there was a high poverty rate in the Catskills,” she said. “Most people found him to be very aggressive and questioned his character and truthfulness. Both Bobby and Riverkeeper didn’t really do anything in the negotiations except to tell us we weren’t doing enough.”
In addition to alienating the city authorities and other environmental attorneys negotiating the watershed, Kennedy was treated with suspicion by the local leaders in the western part of the watershed, most of whom were Republican, Ruzow said. “They all thought Bobby was a lunatic23. I was disappointed. I had worked on his father’s campaign in Yonkers when he ran for senator. I could never reconcile what I remembered of Bobby Kennedy with his son.”
For his part, Kennedy said he had launched some forty lawsuits against nursing homes, schools, and hospitals within the watershed, claiming that they were illegally pumping untreated sewage into the reservoirs without penalty from New York City.
Before their contretemps, Gelber had asked Kennedy to speak to a community group in Brooklyn on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He was “a very gifted person” and a great public speaker, she said, although he had few qualms about “creating scapegoats and victims” to win an argument. Still, after New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had fired her in 1996 because she had tried to protect the commission from political appointees, she said, Kennedy had sent her a bouquet of flowers and a nice note. “Bobby thought I’d done a good job, and sent me the most beautiful narcissus bulbs,” she said. “Our relationship ended on that note.”
***
As Kennedy’s environmental activism grew, he found himself increasingly in demand to speak to nonprofits and conventions across the country and around the world. Democratic politicians, including former Vice President Al Gore, reached out to him when they wanted to emphasize their own environmental bona fides. Gore wrote the introduction to The Riverkeepers. As his outside influence rose, Kennedy soon began to demand a greater profile at Riverkeeper, and it wasn’t long before he began butting heads with Bob Boyle, the head of the group. “Kennedy saw Riverkeeper as a way24 to get out of his pariah status,” said Alex Boyle, an art dealer and filmmaker as well as Bob Boyle’s son. “He saw this as a stepping-stone to prominence and was a bit reckless. One thing about him is that he always bragged about taking shortcuts, and his recklessness made him look quite shallow.”
Boyle continued to keep Kennedy on the board because his last name brought in millions of dollars in donations and celebrity endorsements, said Alex. During Kennedy’s involvement with the group, Riverkeeper grew from a single nonprofit to chapters across the country, protecting various rivers.
While Kennedy continued his high-profile environmental activism, the Kennedy family was back in the gossip columns and on the front pages for more of their entitled behavior. His uncle Ted Kennedy had married for the second time in July 1992, which was a fairly positive story after his decade of womanizing and heavy drinking before and after his divorce from his first wife, the socialite Joan Bennett. His new wife, Victoria Reggie, was a lawyer who specialized in banking law and divorced mother of two, who is credited with revitalizing his political career. Reggie was also his most important confidante and a key political adviser as well as a formidable campaigner during his 1994 Senate campaign—his seventh. During the campaign, his first wife tried to reopen the financial settlement from her divorce from the senator.
“People used to choose the Kennedys25 because they represented youth, energy and good looks,” said the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had written The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga and had remained close to the Kennedy family. “In this race, given that Mitt Romney is young, with a beautiful wife and a perfect looking family, and that Teddy is older, it helps that Vicki can play the role of the Kennedyesque figure—young, beautiful, energetic.” Reggie appeared in campaign commercials in which she was seen listening intently to the sixty-two-year-old lawmaker and nestling her head on his shoulder.
